John Houseman, an actor perhaps most widely known as Professor Kingsfield in the long-running TV series, The Paper Chase, later became the pitchman for Smith Barney.
In that advertisement, his tag line was "We make money the old-fashioned way -- we earn it."

That we should earn our money rather than live off the efforts of others seems a simple enough
moral tenet. But it seems to have lost its cogency in contemporary economic thought. More than
a century ago John Stuart Mill noted that

Landlords grow richer in their sleep without working, risking or economizing. The
increase in the value of land, arising as it does from the efforts of an entire
community, should belong to the community and not to the individual who might
hold title.(1)

Today, on the other hand, the unearned surplus which classical economists called rent attaches to
monopoly titles -- largely the scarce goods and services of nature like locational sites, and has
totally disappeared from economic calculus. Yet this is the primary vehicle by which wealth is
captured by economic elites. If government recaptured the socially-created economic rent from
land sites that comes from the investment of the collective community, we could eliminate other
taxes that are both more onerous and create a drag on the economy that makes us all poorer.
There are many websites that explain how this can be done, ways that not only beget greater
economic efficiency but also bring about economic justice.(2) The surplus economic rent that
derives from community effort is its rightful entitlement.

Where does economic rent most tend to lodge? In the center of cities where people are. And
also proximate to heavy social investments -- such as railroad and metro stations, public and
office buildings, hotels and conference centers, and anywhere there is high traffic in personal or
market exchanges. The land value in New York City is higher than all the rest of the New York
state combined, even though it is only a minute fraction of the area. One 9-acre site south of the
United Nations Building was recently sold to a developer intent on building luxury
condominiums facing the East River. That site sold for $680 million, and would have been
higher had the existing structure, an obsolete power
plant, not have to be razed.(3) Land values in any
given area tend to rise and fall together, and tend
also to form a contour somewhat comparable to a
topographical survey map. In a city's center are
the highest value locations, analogous to a
mountain peak. Once one departs from that center,
land values fall in direct proportion to the value of
their use, made more or less attractive by whatever
social attributes are provided in the proximate
areas. Two illustrations from small and medium
sized cities in the United States illustrate the point.

Case 1: Ithaca, New York: Tompkins County,
where the city of Ithaca sits at the center, has land
values many times those within a short walk.
Dividing the county land parcels into quintiles, the
highest fifth have values of $56,000 per acre and
above. Yet lowest fifth have a value of less than
$3,000 per acre. The high value area collectively
constitutes only a minute proportion of the total
number of square miles because most of it is farm
or forest land.

Case 2: Des Moines, Iowa: Polk County, where Des Moines sits near the center, has land values
even more disparate between urban and rural locations. The highest quartile there are those
$97,400 per acre and above, the single highest parcel of all worth an astonishing $31.4 million
per acre. Yet, the lowest quartile, a roughly equal number of far larger parcels, all have a value
of less than $30,000 per acre.

Yet because society has not elected to recapture the socially created land value of the highest
priced parcels, the rent that accrues to those sites becomes the windfall gain of their titleholders.
Regardless whether those titleholders use their landsites productively or not, the continuing rent
that accretes in those land sites drives up their market price. This forces developers who might
wish to improve parcels not used to best advantage
to settle instead on sites that are sub-optimal.
Were the rent collected from the current
titleholders of those sites, their use would be
encouraged to the full extent that their value
warrants. They would be encouraged to seek the
best return for the carrying costs of those
underused parcels -- the higher the tax of rent, the
greater the incentive to use landsites well.

To secure the fullest results of collecting land rent,
structures should be removed entirely from revenue
base and imposed on the land component alone.
Phasing out the tax burden on improvements and
placing it on land value alone removes the penalty
now placed on those who do invest in and maintain
their buildings. And, as mentioned earlier, it
prompts titleholders to abjure practices for
speculative gain.
If only the land value component
of the property tax is collected and tax on buildings
is eliminated, those who do use landsites to the full
extent that their value warrants are rewarded for
doing so.

The failure to collect site rent leads to a distortion
in land use configurations. If patterns unfolded
along the lines of both social preference and
economic efficiency, high value landsites would
tend to have high value buildings, and low value
landsites would tend to be vacant or have very
modest buildings. Consistent with this, urban
centers sites would tend to have office and
commercial use, surrounded by lower-value
residential land uses, and still further out would be
farms and forests. The ratio of building to land
value, land to total value (or for that matter any
other ratio between buildings, land, and total
values) would be relatively constant throughout a
region. Instead, the ratio of land value to total
value consistently tends to reveal a patchwork of
random development. This inefficient settlement
of land sites is what we know as sprawl.

Land Rent is Capitalized Transportation Cost

There is another dimension to the distortion
of land use in contemporary life. That is the
heavy subsidy granted to motor vehicle
transportation services. Estimates are that
the typical driver pays only about a tenth of
the true cost of his travel; society picks up
the rest. This profuse subsidy paid to private
automobile and truck transportation further
encourages people to locate on sites at far
greater distances from where they would
choose than if they had to pay the full
burden of that travel.

Ratio of Building Value to
Land Value

Red

501%

to

64180%

33,768

Blue

367%

to

501%

33,386

Green

206%

to

367%

33,650

Yellow

0%

to

206%

33,888

From the standpoint of an economic geographer, and for some land economists, land rent is
simply capitalized transportation cost. Land rent is the surplus generated by social activity on or
in the vicinity of locational sites which accrues to titleholders of those parcels. Whether or not it
is recaptured by public policy, rent is a natural factor deriving from the intensive use of natural
capital. More intensive use of high value landsites leads to site configurations that are less
dependent upon transportation services. People can access them easily even by walking. One
must remember that transportation is not an end in itself but rather a means. This is something
often forgotten even by urban planners, the distinction between accessibility and mobility. As
explained well in a recent text, The Geography of Urban Transportation:

Accessibility refers to the number of opportunities, also called activity
sites, available within a certain distance or travel time. Mobility refers to the
ability to move between different activity sites (e.g., from home to a grocery
store).(4)

The result is that we do an awful lot of traveling to get what and where we want. We have paid
enormously for mobility even at the expense of access. Subsidizing motor vehicle transportation
makes the problem worse! Author Kirkpatrick Sale recognized this when he argued that

Cities are meant to stop traffic. That is their point. That is why they are
there. That is why traders put outposts there, merchants put shops there, hostellers
erect inns there. That is why factories locate there, why warehouses, assembly
plants, and distribution centers are established there. That is why people settle
and cultural institutions grow there. No one wants to operate in a place that
people are just passing through; everyone wants to settle where people will stop,
and rest, and look around, and talk, and buy, and share.(5)

Site Rent and Transportation Costs
Linked

Higher density development has all the
economies of scale, savings in cost,
reduction in externalities, dividends in
community and political enhancement, and
benefits to urban areas that we all say that
we want. The greater the proximity to
points of desirable accessibility, the lower
are typically the transportation costs.
Conversely, sites remote from the urban
centers of greatest locational value will
have higher transportation costs. When the
fixed costs of transportation infrastructure
and parcel site improvements are accounted for (which tend to be relatively the same regardless
of location), one is left with the marginal costs of operations.(6) This is illustrated most easily in
conceptual Figure 1:

This relationship has been demonstrated more empirically in a recent study by the Urban Land
Institute. The author concluded that, for Portland Oregon,

each additional mile [traveled] translated into slightly more than $5,000 in
housing costs; closer-in locations command a premium, those farther out save
money. A ten-mile difference, all other things being equal, would amount to
about $56,000 in new home value.

For a household in which one worker drives downtown (or at least to a
more central location) to work, that ten-mile difference may amount to 4,600
miles annually, assuming 230 days of commuting and a round-trip of 20 miles
each day. Moreover, if non-work trips to the central area and elsewhere doubled
that amount, the tradeoff would be about 9,000 miles annually, which could mean
a higher/lower driving cost of $3,000 annually, not counting the time saved/spent.(7)

That's the savings for living closer to the urban center by ten miles. If the urban resident has to
rely upon a car nonetheless, subtracting some $3,000 annual travel expenses will still leave him
paying again that much, and likely more, to own a car. Seven years ago James Kunstler put the
true costs along with other experts at about $6,100 annually.(8) The American Automobile
Association calculated that a car driven 15,000 miles in 2001 cost 51¢ per mile or $7,650.(9) Even
that figure reflects only direct costs to the driver, not those passed on to society. One study
calculated that the total costs of motor vehicle transportation to our society equal approximately
one-fourth of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).(10) In 1991 road user fees totaled only about
$33 billion whereas the true costs to society were ten times that;(11) put another way, drivers paid
only 10% of the true costs of their motor vehicle use.(12)

The latter figures include externalities like pollution and the costs of highway crashes. Hortatory
public pleas for people to tune up their engines so they pollute less, inflate their tires properly,
and drive more safely are not likely to change the reality that people are forgetful and fallible.
Regardless, pollution-free cars are not available; people must drive to participate in this society.
The consequences of SO2, CO2, and ozone are no longer a matter of debate; they are scientific
fact. Despite frequent headlines about replacing the internal combustion engine, all the realistic
substitutes also rely upon fossil fuel power directly or indirectly; solar powered cars are far in the
future, if at all, and also fail to deal with any transition. And every person driving his or her own
car multiplies the probabilities of accidents. Those crashes alone, nothing else, represents a figure
equal to 8 percent of the American GDP.(13) In human terms nationally, this is about 43,000 deaths
and 2 million hospitalizations annually. When people step into a car they are seldom mindful of
such odds. However, if the direct
pecuniary costs of driving increase in any
substantial way, such as for an increase
in motor fuel as many experts forecast,
there will surely be significant changes in
the tradeoffs involved in
housing/transportation choices.(14) And
indeed a radical shift in the use of
petroleum looms closely on the horizon.
The consensus view of most oil
geologists is that worldwide oil
extraction will peak sometime in about
2009 or shortly thereafter, then to fall off
rather quickly. That graphic record and
projection of oil mining is shown in
Figure 3.(15) Making costs visible and
linked to private personal behavior is one
way to ensure that transportation pays its
own way -- if it isn't already too late to save us.

Public opinion polls are practically unanimous in their demonstration of the kind of environment
most Americans say they would like to live in.(16) Sociological studies have documented
graphically how alienating the car-dependent environment really is. There is an inverse
correlation between the ability of a street to move and to park cars and trucks, and the amount of
social interaction between neighbors on that street. One study two decades ago compared three
similar residential streets in San Francisco, with different levels of traffic volumes. Residents on
the different streets were asked to indicate on the base maps of their streets where friends and
acquaintances lived. Those living on streets with the least traffic volume had three times as
many friends and twice as many acquaintances as those living on the streets with heavy traffic
volumes.(17) More recently Harvard Professor Robert Putnam has made similar findings in his
book Bowling Alone, and concluded that every ten minutes of additional commuting time means
ten percent less time devoted to communal activity.(18) Driving is no longer regarded as fun, not
on today's typically congested highways. There was a time when most people drove cars for
pleasure; today people resent their having to drive so much and often see driving as a burden.(19) It
is also no accident also that on measures of livability, those locations regarded as most attractive
are also the ones that are most bicycle-friendly.(20) A number of recent books and their popularity
reflect resentment over our forced dependency on motor vehicle transportation Jane Holtz Kay's
Asphalt Nation, Clay McShane's Down the Asphalt Path, Wolfgang Zuckerman's End of the
Road, and Katie Alford's Divorce Your Car are only a few such examples.(21) But despite their
vague discomfort people typically
lack the perspicacity to incorporate
these non-pecuniary costs into their
decisions about locational choice.

Correcting Distortions by
Pricing: Increasing the Collection
of Land Rent

Recovering the economic rent from
urban parcels helps people to
appreciate the true costs of the
transportation versus location
trade-off. It brings the carrying
costs of site choices back to the
present time and makes them
comparable with travel choices.
The payment of site rent becomes
an operating cost. The other
corrective policy needed is to raise transportation costs to a level commensurate with their full
value as private goods. Transportation user fees, in the form of motor fuel taxes, green taxes,
congestion fees, and administrative costs (for the administration of drivers' licenses and
registration fees) could easily provide the needed price corrections to bring into balance marginal
transportation costs and land rent collection. Doing so would equilibrate choices between people
living and working in high rent urban centers and those in peripheral low rent (but higher travel
cost) locales.

Figure 2 shows how a tax on land value (or alternatively the tax on land rent) coupled with the
proper design of transportation fees can equilibrate the competitive advantage of markets in
urban areas relative to suburbs, thereby reducing, and perhaps even reversing, the centrifugal
forces of sprawl development. The land tax cannot alone redress the problem, especially so long
as such inordinate social subsidies are granted to private motor vehicle transportation services.
Nor can transportation fees, raised to a level fully commensurate with the social and private costs
they incur, alone ensure that the price of locations will be matched. But to the extent that both
are assessed, they reach far toward correcting this disequilibrium. One could even argue that all
site rent should be recaptured by society and that all transportation costs that are identifiable as
consumption of private goods should be priced accordingly. Some advocates even suggest that
doing so will not only foster economic efficient behavior but also provide sufficient revenue for a
citizen's dividend consistent with economic justice.

Arriving at the appropriate revenue formulas is the challenge. Recapturing land rent is likely best
achieved by setting the rates at levels that stabilize the market price of landsites in the face of
speculative pressures. Because the collection of rents fosters economic activity in the regions of
highest value, it may just be that market prices will remain stable even with very high levies.
The downward pressure on market prices exerted by a tax is countered by the increased incentive
to improve parcel sites with the highest value. Many economists as early as the French
physiocrats have argued that ultimately all tax revenues come from rents in any case; that it is
only a question of how much they are shifted through to other sectors of the economy before they
are collected. Professor Mason Gaffney explains this by noting that

After-tax interest rates are determined in world markets and the local supply of
capital funds is highly elastic. So, local taxes on capital do not stick to capital.
Even national taxes on capital typically fail to stick, because capital is a citizen of
the world. Local labor supplies are also pretty elastic, although not so totally.
Local taxes on labor, therefore, do not stick to labor, either. Payroll taxes drive
people out of localities that impose them, for example. Ditto for sales taxes.
Customers move, or shift their purchases, to where taxes are lower, or zero.
Sellers shift, too, to the extent they bear the tax. What else is left? Just land, and
land cannot emigrate or immigrate from the local jurisdiction.(22)

This means that taxing away land rent more relieves it from circulating through labor and capital,
allowing those factors in turn to be more productive. Significantly, perhaps most importantly,
the collection of land rent, on account of its inelasticity, incurs no deadweight loss like tax levies
on labor and capital. The economy thus functions more efficiently -- i.e. with less drag and
friction.

Lest one believe that this excess burden, or so-called deadweight loss, is a negligible drag on the
economy, studies show just the opposite. One study calculates that it was equal to about 20
percent of the total US economy in the mid-1990s, annually at least one trillion dollars in lost
output.(23) Put another way, a well designed efficient revenue structure would allow productivity
to rise by that amount and effectively make our income that much higher. For Great Britain, the
comparable figure was shown to be £400 billion annually.

Deadweight loss is a concept understood by economists but not by the general public. But this is
likely to change as discussion about the merit of various taxation approaches is presented to the
public. Nations in the European Community are now required to publish their calculations about
the deadweight loss of the various tax schemes being reviewed, precisely because of the
recognition of its importance as a factor of production.(24)

The one kind of tax where there is no deadweight loss whatsoever is that imposed upon an base
with inelastic supply. Since land and some other elements of nature cannot be increased in
quantity resulting in a completely vertical supply curve, no inefficiency is incurred by such a tax.
Consider two cases of a tax commonly found worldwide on real estate. Because a real property
tax is actually two taxes from the standpoint of economic dynamics -- the tax on the land
component and the tax on the improvement component, each is considered here as a separate
case. In the first case, the tax on the land component alone is illustrated. In the other case, the
tax on the improvement component (i.e. the building) is shown. What happens?

The tax on land alone is completely capitalized in the market value of the land parcel and is not
passed forward to the tenant. This is important, because when the roughly 1/3 of all American
households that rent rather than own their own homes are removed from the burden of property
taxation, it has the effect of making the
land tax far more progressive. Those
land parcels that do pay taxes are split
between residential and non-residential
titleholders. Even though the residential
households are likely to constitute the
overwhelming number of parcels in the
tax base, they are likely to bear only
about half the taxes paid, the remaining
share borne largely by commercial sites.
Agricultural parcels may in some
instances represent a large area of land,
but it is likely to be of far lower market
value and represent less than five
percent of the revenue paid. The land
component of a tax on real property then
is actually highly progressive.

Consider now the tax on the
improvement portion of the property
parcel. Here, depending upon the
slope of the supply curve and the
demand curve, the tax is likely to be
passed forward to a greater or lesser
extent to the tenant. Very little of it in
fact is typically borne by the landlord.
The existence of the tax on structures
incurs a depressing effect upon the
rate of investment, just like all such
taxes with more than zero elasticity.
And the greater scarcity of sites for
rent, either commercial or residential,
has the impact of driving up prices for
their use. What is even more
significant, as noted earlier, is that the shift of taxes off improvements and onto landsites
encourages the use of those sites to the full extent of their locational value, thereby halting and
even reversing the centrifugal forces of sprawl development. Greater investment in high value
landsites creates greater density and proximity in the community, enhancing the accessibility of
those sites to one another and reducing the need for transportation mobility.

Correcting Distortions by Pricing: Increasing the Recovery of Transportation Service Costs

With respect to charges upon transportation services and externalities, there are several
components to a proper pricing design.(25) The first step to proper pricing is to identify the
proportion of transportation services that ought rightly to be seen as private goods as opposed to
public goods.(26) Although this is a daunting task, the frequent figure used is 80 percent - 20
percent proportion. The public good proportion of road use reflects the amount of reliance by
services provided by the government and associated agencies like mail service, national defense,
public safety (ambulance, police and fire departments), and so on. The private use of the roads
constitutes the overwhelming amount of its use. This means that as a rule 80 percent of the
highway use charges should be paid by individual drivers, directly or indirectly. It is easy to
distinguish five elements of transportation service cost: capital investment, maintenance costs,
regulation costs, environmental externalities and congestion costs. Each of these calls for a
different treatment with respect to revenue design.

As noted earlier, capital investments affect the market value of locational sites by conveying rent
to those in any way benefitting from the service. That rent accruing to proximate sites and can
easily recaptured to pay off the debt service of project construction. Typically rent collection is
ignored, however, left instead in the hands of titleholders whose sites are serviced by the
infrastructure investment. This drives speculation in land, with all the negative effects it brings
both economically and politically. In fact the rent created by capital investment in transportation
can be enormous. One nine-mile stretch of interstate highway in Albany, New York, costing
$125 million to construct has yielded $3.8 billion in increased land values within just two miles
of its corridor in the 40 years of its existence.(27) This is a thirty-fold return in a timespan typically
used for bond repayment! The Washington Metro created increments in land value along much
of the 101-mile system under of construction in 1980 that easily exceeded $3.5 billion, compared
with the $2.7 billion of federal funds invested in Metro up until that time.(28) No doubt the return
is far greater today. The component of transportation costs constituting capital expenditure can
and should be recaptured through the collection of land rent since it accounts for the creation of
that value particular to proximate locational sites.

Maintenance costs on the other hand are best paid for from user fees, and can range from excise
taxes on motor fuel, tires, heavy truck charges and others still. Such pricing has received
considerable attention in recent years, even though it has been difficult to implement for political
reasons. Heavy trucks, for example, pay special mileage charges, which should ideally be based
upon axle-weight and distance, commensurate with the wear and tear on the roads that they
cause. High-tech innovations using transponders for electronic road pricing according to time
and place of vehicle travel are being explored and implemented in Hong Kong, Singapore, New
Zealand and on modest scales elsewhere.(29) The virtue of a tax on motor fuel, at least for
automobiles, is that charges are roughly commensurate with miles driven if rates are set at the
proper levels. But electronic road pricing can be far more precise if concerns about personal
privacy can be overcome by computers that calculate user charges based solely upon point
calculations. Bringing prices into line with marginal costs is the most efficient and equitable way
to pay for highway transportation services, and one can expect to witness significant advances in
this realm before too many years pass.

Separate from maintenance operations are the costs involved in the regulation and supervision of
drivers and motor vehicles themselves. License and registration fees should ideally be designed
only to recover the costs involved in their administration. To be sure, such administration may
reach to operations beyond license plate bureaucracies to safety inspections, certain judicial
functions, and so on. But charging for road use through such measures is not only inefficient but
inequitable.(30)

Charging for pollution externalities of motor vehicle travel invites more complex issues. One
approach widely explored involves reliance upon what are known as Pigou taxes, after noted
British economist Arthur Pigou.(31) It attempts to recover the costs of externalities in the natural
environment and even involving health damages. Yet Pigou taxes are more often talked about
than actually implemented. Related to such designs are those growing out of the theories of
Ronald Coase, designed not necessarily to recover the full social costs of negative externalities
but rather to foster the most efficient economic choice among options, even if some parties are
disadvantaged.(32) Taxes recovering such costs are most easily collected at the production stage
-- at the wellhead or the refinery for oil, and from the manufacturer for tires and other
materials.(33) Still a third approach is that represented by the Georgist tradition, which would
recover the costs of specified pollution externalities by accepting them to the extent that the
environment is capable of absorbing them, and charging polluters for the use of the environment
as a sink for such wastes. This approach is particularly attractive as a way to charge for the
release of noxious gases in motor vehicle exhaust.(34)

The last dimension of motor vehicle transportation charges can be designed to reflect the costs of
congestion. To some extent, those costs are already borne by drivers since they pay in the value
of their time for that lost by slowed traffic. But not everyone's time has the same value, and
proper pricing of road use reflective of time and place is an attractive solution to maintaining the
efficient flow of highway service. Here again, electronic road pricing can help with efficiency.

These pricing approaches taken together offer the prospect of both recovering costs in their
varied forms as well as fostering efficient transportation services. There are grave misconception
in how much fiscal policies distort social and economic behavior. And the fiscal policies that
foster the greatest distortions of all are those involving road costs and the failure to collect
economic rent. Rather than resort to traditional command-and-control approaches which are
frequently just as cumbersome and distorting as current unthinking fiscal measures, now is an
opportune time to consider models which will help us to get things right.

Costs of Conventional Taxes and Subsidies

The conventional property tax, one taxing both land values and improvement values, is
analogous to a train with an engine at each end. The tax on land value fosters improvement on
the parcels with the highest market and social value, while the tax on structures discourages that
very same thing. No wonder it is that economic activities is stymied most in the urban centers
and manifests itself in areas where the least imposition of all has taken hold. As scholar Jessica
Matthews once put it,

In a now familiar sequence, developers reach for the cheapest land, out in
the cow pastures. Government is left to fill in behind with brand new
infrastructure roads, sewerage systems and schools paid for in part by those
whose existing roads and schools are left to decline. Property values rise in a ring
that marches steadily outward from the city and fall in older suburbs inside the
moving edge. Because residential development can't meet the public bills, local
governments compete for commercial investment with tax discounts that deplete
their revenues still further. Property taxes then rise, providing an incentive for
new development. Years of such leap-frogging construction devours land at an
astonishing pace.(35)

Developing land use and transportation patterns that assume walkability or transit service rather
than individual and private motor vehicles is the very definition of livability. Experts agree that
the minimum density necessary to make public transit services economically viable is 10 to 12
households per acre, although cities developed in the post-automobile era, lamentably, one sees
very little prospect of altering automobile dependency.(36) One study found that "the range of costs
induced by spread-out development, . . [i.e.] houses built in sprawling developments, may cost
40 to 400 percent more to serve than if they were located close to major facilities, were clustered
in continuous areas, and in corporate a variety of housing types."(37) But by bringing prices into
line with costs, both on the transportation services side and on the site-rent side, it is possible
both to foster those personal choice calculations that are consistent with sustainable urban
environments.

There remains the problem, however, of rearranging a century of site choices, for both residential
and commercial purposes, at a time when circumstances may not afford us the time or resources
to make such shifts. Land uses, once established, tend to be intractably embedded, and buildings
retain their use for work, commerce and livability for decades if not centuries. What will happen
when the costs of transportation limit our mobility and our access to a level that energy costs
allow? What will happen when suburbs, now the most attractive of residential location choices
become irretrievably remote and inaccessible? If they do become the next century's slums, as
observers like historian Kenneth Jackson predicts,(38) the United States may quickly find itself
unable to compete economically and even survive politically in a fashion that it has enjoyed in
the twentieth century.

6. There is some empirical evidence for this. Anthony Downs notes that,

"Housing and transportation costs are inversely related. In outlying settlements, households with more than
one worker usually need two or more vehicles to get everyone to their jobs. That increases their transportation costs.
Because their homes tend to be built on lower-cost rural land, however, their housing costs are relatively low.
Conversely, in denser urban areas that are well served by public transit, households with two or more workers can
get by with one vehicle--or even none. For these households, transportation costs are likely to be a lower percentage
of their budget than their rural counterparts. But urban land is usually valuable real estate, so their housing costs are
likely to be steeper.

"Data on consumer spending in specific regions backs up these observations. The highest fraction of
consumer spending on transportation was 22.8 percent in the Houston area, which is notorious for traffic
congestion. The lowest was 15.3 percent in the New York City area, which has an extensive public transit system.
But Houston households spent only 30.6 percent on housing, whereas New York households spent 36.9 percent.
Combined, both types of spending were about the same in the two cities. Similar inverse relationships between
housing and transportation spending prevailed in all of the 28 metropolitan regions for which data were available.

"Another piece of evidence that partially supports this relationship comes from "The Costs of Sprawl
2000," a recent study conducted by Rutgers University, the Brookings Institution and several other organizations.
Part of the research examined how housing prices vary with distance from the regional downtown of each
metropolitan area. Although only a few areas were analyzed, the study showed consistently that prices of similar
homes tended to decline about 1.2 to 1.5 percent per additional mile from the regional downtown, except where
proximity to the ocean had more influence on prices--as in Southern California. Meanwhile, longer-distance
commutes added to fuel and travel-time costs by about the same amount per mile in every region. The study also
found that per-mile housing-cost savings from added commuting distance were much larger in regions with
absolutely very high housing costs than in those with absolutely low housing costs." "Can Transit Tame Sprawl?"
Governing Magazine, January, 2002, p. 54.

7. Robert T. Dunphy, "The Cost of Being Close: Land Values and Housing Prices in Portland's High Tech
Corridor," ULI Working Paper #660, October, 1998, www.uli.org/Pub/Pages/a_issues/660/a_trl44_cost.html.

9. www.ouraaa.com/news/library/drivingcost/. Driving 10,000 miles per year will typically cost 64.5¢ per
mile or $6,450, and driving 20,000 miles per year will cost 45.8¢ per mile, $9,160.

10. Peter Miller and John Moffet The Price of Mobility: Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Transportation.
Washington: Natural Resources Defense Council, 1993. This is somewhat more than the US Department of
Transportation's own calculation. The latter uses only direct measurable pecuniary costs, and estimates the figure
was in the neighborhood of $1 trillion for the year 1992, about 17 percent of GNP. (Converted to GDP would make
it somewhat higher.) Since it fails to include externalities such as pollution, accidents, and other associated costs, it
seems a reasonable estimate. Transportation Statistics Annual Report, 1994. Washington: Department of
Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 1994, pp.4-5.

11. See James J. MacKenzie, et. al., The Going Rate: What It Really Costs to Drive. World Resources
Institute, Washington, 1992.

12. Road Kill: How Solo Driving Runs Down the Economy. Boston: The Conservation Law Foundation
(May, 1994), p. 7. This study is a summary of a larger study done by Apogee Research, Inc., funded by the Joyce
Foundation.

13. 13In 1988, a study by the Urban Institute calculated that $71 billion were borne in out-of-pocket costs, another
$46 billion in lost wages and household production, and $217 billion in pain, suffering and lost quality of life.
Translated into vernacular, the total of $334 billion in lost property, work time, and injuries and deaths. T. Miller, et
al, The Costs of Highway Crashes, The Urban Institute, Washington, D.C., October, 1991.

18. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York:
Touchstone Books, 2001.

19. 19In a study done by the Washington Post in the early 1990s, 25 percent of Americans are "road haters" who
don't enjoy driving. Another 15 percent consider cars a necessary evil but take little interest in style, color or
upkeep. Forty percent of drivers may be disenchanted, but except for those living in cities with good public
transportation ,driving remains the only reasonable way to get around. Cited in Steve Nadis and James J. McKenzie,
Car Trouble (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), p. ix.

21. Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How we can Take it Back. New York:
Crown Publishers, 1997; Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994; The End of the Road: The World Car Crisis and How we can Solve it. Cambridge:
Lutterworth Press, 1991; Divorce Your Car: Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile. British Columbia: New
Society Publishers, 2000. There are as many studies also of conspiracies about how the motor vehicle industry
seduced or trapped the nation into such patterns: Jonathan Kwitney's "The Great Transportation Conspiracy,"
Harper's Magazine, February, 1981, which is based on the trial in a Chicago federal court in 1949, resulting in an
indictment of GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks among others. Their crime as in
forming a holding company called National City lines which proceeded in the preceding decade to buy up the public
transportation services in dozens of US cities, and then scrapping them so that people would then become more
automobile dependent. The corporations were fined $5,000 each, and the CEOs of each one $1. See United States
Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, "American Ground Transport: A Proposal for
Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus and Rail Industries," by Bradford C., Snell, February 26, 1974
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974); and two more books (among others!) With the same title:
the first by Bill Vlasic and Bradley Stertz, Taken for a Ride: How Daimler Benz Drove Off with Chrysler. New
York: HarperBusiness, June, 2001, and Jack Doyle: Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of
Pollution. New York: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 2000.

23. Fred Harrison (ed.), The Losses of Nations: Deadweight Politics versus Public Rent Dividends, London:
Othila Press, 1998. See also "The Deadweight Loss of Income Taxes," National Center for Policy Analysis, There it
is argued that "the efficiency loss from current income taxes is more than 30 percent. If Social Security taxes are
included, there is a 50 percent efficiency loss." www.ncpa.org/pi/taxes/pd053000g.html.

24. Personal communication with Prof. Mikael Skou Anderson, National Environmental Research Institute,
Denmark, at the Third Annual Global Conference on Environmental Taxation, Woodstock, Vt, April, 2002. For
further explanation of the concept of excess burden, or deadweight loss, see www.xrefer.com/entry/445003;
www.ncpa.org/pi/taxes/pd053000g.html; and www.ncpa.org/studies/s215/s215b.html.

25. This argument roughly follows a presentation originally made in Denver at the TOES (The Other
Economic Summit) conference in 1997, later published in The Ecological Economics Bulletin, First Quarter, 1998
(Vol.3, No.1), pp. 1-14, as "Motor Vehicle Transportation and Proper Pricing," summarized online at
www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5148/batt_on_transportation.html

26. As economists use the term, a public good is one whose consumption is non-rival and non-exclusive. To
be non-rival means that consumption of a good or service by some does not preclude its consumption by others. To
be non-exclusive means that non-payers cannot be prohibited from using that good or service. One economics
textbook offers the following alternative definition: "A public good is a commodity or service whose benefits are
not depleted by an additional user and for which it is generally difficult or impossible to exclude people from its
benefits, even if they are unwilling to pay for them. In contrast, a private good is characterized by both
excludability and depletability." William J. Baumol and Alan S. Blinder, Economics: Principles and Policy, Third
Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p.543. National defense, clean air, and mosquito control are
usually offered as cases of services that come as close to being "pure" public goods as the real world offers. A
private good, in contrast, is one which has the attributes of being both rival and exclusive. That is, its consumption
by one party depletes its availability to others, and consumers can be required to pay in order to obtain it. A
hamburger can be considered a private good insofar as it cannot be eaten by two persons at the same time. For a
good to be exclusive means that those who do not pay can be barred from its consumption: the metering of electric,
gas, cable, and phone lines is done to prevent non-payers from tapping in. Radio and television are non-exclusive,
and therefore are paid for not by consumer listeners but through advertising. Highways have elements of both public
and private good, and the demand for each should ideally determine how much each sector should pay. See also
Musgrave, pp. 6-ff.

27. H. William Batt, "Value Capture as a Policy Tool in Transportation Economics: An Exploration in Public
Finance in the Tradition of Henry George," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol 60, No. 1
(January, 2001), pp 195-228; reprinted in Laurence S. Moss (ed.), City and Country. Malden MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001.

29. "On the 1 April 1998 Singapore turned on the S$197 million Electronic Road Pricing (ERP} system.
With ERP in place, Singapore is the first country in the world to use ERP for traffic management. Transponders are
window mounted and cost about $150 each." http://rapidttp.com/transponder/trendfut.html;
www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/case.htm?PID=1520; www.itshongkong.com/report/erp.html;
www.aas.com.sg/features/archive/erpbig.gif; www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm35.htm.

30. Many states make this mistake. Consider the person who stores a vehicle or doesn't drive it but a few
miles a year. At least antique car hobbiests can usually purchase registration plates reflective of such minimal use;
so also for farmers, whose use is largely off public roads.

32. R.H. Coase, "The Problem of Social Costs," Journal of Law and Economics, (1960), pp. 1-44.

33. Ideally, deposits should be added to the price of vehicles to pay the costs of their disposal at the end of
their useful lives, perhaps to be refunded to the registered titleholder when discard.

34. See, for example, Peter Barnes, Who Owns the Sky?: Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism,
Washington: Island Press, 1999.

35. "Are Automobiles the Blessing that's Turning into a Curse?" by Jessica Matthews, Albany Times Union,
Friday, October 4, 1996.

36. Transit and Urban Form, Report 16, Portland: Parsons Brinkerhoff, National Academy Press (sponsored
by the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board), 1996.

37. Frank, James E. (1989), The Costs of Alternative Development Patterns: A Review of the Literature.
Washington: The Urban Land Instated, p. 5. See also Kelbaugh, Douglas (1986), "The Costs of Sprawl to Society,"
in Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe, Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities Suburbs and
Towns. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. See also Robert Burchell, et al., The Costs of Sprawl-- Revisited, TCRP
Report 39, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, 1998.

38. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.